UK Data Service
February 2026
Five partner universities
90+ staff
Since 2012 (UKDA \(\rightarrow\) 1967); curates national data since 2003
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UK social survey microdata:
International data: survey data, aggregate databases
Census tables and individual data – current and historical
Business microdata and administrative data
Qualitative data: multimedia files and interview transcripts
Introductions to datasets:
Datasets e.g Census, LFS
Data types e.g Surveys
Substantive themes e.g Crime
Evaluating data for research
Preparing data/data handling
Basic data analysis skills
Basic software/tools
Teaching with data
User conferences
Computational Social Science
Reproducible research
Usually arising from the interaction between:
Birth or death certification, mortgage or benefits application, filing tax returns, going to the GP or the A&E
Exemples:
In the UK: Digital Economy Act 2017:
“… de-identified1 data from government service providers, excluding NHS data, as part of their day-to-day functions, may be shared for public good research”
OFSTED ‘State of the nation’: anonymised data on latest schools inspections outcomes of 22,000 open schools
Linked with the MCS, currently covers years 2005 to 2019
Data on a wide range of topics i.e.:
(National Employment Saving Trust)
Covers 1,000,000 employers, 11 millions employees
Linked to consenting Understanding Wave 11 respondents (about 12,000)
Data about:
Depends on:
Major longitudinal studies:
A few large scale cross-sectional surveys such as:
Next Steps
ELSA (English Longitudinal Study of Ageing):
Largest longitudinal study of the UK population
Initial sample size: 40K households, 100K individuals
14 waves so far: 2009-23. Includes BHPS data 1991-2009
Ethnic minority boost samples, innovation panel
Very wide range of topics covered:
Further topics:
Trusted Research Environment - TRE
Currently enables linkage between longitudinal studies and data from:
Planned
Grant, P. (2024) The Monitored Self In: The Virtual Hospital Springer, Cham.
Silber, H., Breuer, J., Beuthner, C., Gummer, T., Keusch, F., Siegers, P., … Weiß, B. (2022). Linking Surveys and Digital Trace Data: Insights From two Studies on Determinants of Data Sharing Behaviour Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society), 185(Suppl. 2), 387-407.
Whiffen, T; Akbari, A ; Paget, T ; Lowe, S; Lyons, R (2020) How effective are population health surveys for estimating prevalence of chronic conditions compared to anonymised clinical data?, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POPULATION DATA SCIENCE (IJPDS) Vol 5:1